Posts Tagged ‘book’

It seems that those of us who have already mode the move to electronic books are very well served indeed by them, apparently regardless of the hardware options.

Indeed, word comes via RegHardware of a survey from industry analysts NPD that those who’ve sprung for ebook reading hardware are very pleased indeed with their purchases. Apparently, 93% of those who’ve picked up an ebook reader fall into either the “very satisfied” or “somewhat satisfied” camps in NPD’s research. Perhaps more interesting still is the fact that only 2% of those surveyed actually said that they weren’t satisfied with their devices.

It seems that the running spat between Amazon and publisher Macmillan has come to something of a close, with Amazon announcing that it will allow the books to be sold for the price Macmillan had requested.

When I was your age, Pluto was a planet and we used to argue about the prices of REAL books...

The issue arose when Macmillan attempted to price digital versions of its books at $15, which is fully 150% of the usual amount for ebooks available through Amazon’s Kindle Store. Macmillan weighed in with the fairly heavy threat that, unless Amazon allowed the heftier pricing, it would not be distributing new books to Amazon on release.

It seems that Amazon has been living it up, thanks in no small part to massive sales of its Kindle ebook reader over the Christmas block.

Amazon seems to have KINDLED a virtual book market... please, shoot me.

According to Cnet, Amazon has had a very fine year indeed, with revenue up to $9.52 billion, a fairly staggering increase on last year, to the tune of 42%. Indeed, reports also indicate that Amazon has seen profits rise by around the 70% mark, which is nothing to be sneezed at. Apparently, the fourth quarter of last year (which happily enough includes both Christmas and the US’s Black Friday sales) was the most profitable quarter the company has ever seen.

It seems that the trend towards the adoption of ebook readers has some book publishers worried over the possibility that their content will see illegal piracy on the rise.

Word comes via TorrentFreak that, despite the general lack of bestselling authors in the list of the top 25 most pirated books last year, many publishers seem to fear the ease with which their content might be distributed illegally for the ebook reader-enabled population. Indeed, as a result of their generally small size once digitised, book publishers could potentially have more to fear from piracy than publishers of more data-heavy media.

Alongside other ebook readers, Amazon’s Kindle service can provide some really interesting broad-spectrum data on what people want from ebooks. It turns out, most people want them for free.

It might seem a touch obvious, but Cnet is reporting that the majority of bestsellers on Amazon’s Kindle service are ones that are offered for free. The only problem is that it paints the ebook business as one in which publishers will be hard pressed to turn a profit; if customers aren’t willing to shell out their hard earned cash for a digital version of a book you could comfortably sell for over €10, then ebooks start to look like a dodgy prospect for publishers.

Well regarded author Stephen Covey has moved to give Amazon exclusive rights to publish the electronic versions of his work from his usual publishers over to Amazon, whose Kindle has been vastly successful as a vehicle for the format.

In its report, the New York Times names Covey as one of the most successful writers of the last twenty years, so it seems fair to say that Covey isn’t angling to easy publicity by being the first author signed exclusively to Amazon, but it’s still going to be a bit of a nasty surprise to book publishers who, until quite recently, haven’t really had too much to fear from the ebook market.

Amazon is updating its Kindle and adding some pretty impressive bits and pieces, including extending the device’s battery life of its Kindle 2 by up to 85% making the whole thing a lot more attractive, but that’s not all.

Word comes from TheRegister that Amazon has also added native PDF support, which has long been one of the features other ebook readers have claimed over the Kindle. The question now is whether or not these updates will just push those who have been, until now, just considering picking up an ebook reader to go for Amazon’s offering or if we’ll just see existing Kindle customers exceedingly pleased with the latest additions.

Apple has amassed some apps from its App Store for loose enough grounds, but it’s added to that list today, blocking an ebook that is a book about the iPhone as a device… on the grounds that it contains the word “iPhone.”

Word comes from Engadget of the latest app shot down by Apple’s confusingly arbitrary App Store approval process, which is perhaps the most confusing rejection yet. Perhaps most worrying for the people at Apple is that the grounds on which the new app has been blocked are already violated by any number of other apps.

Google has announced plans to launch a digital bookshop that would see users downloading ebooks as “Google Editions” to a multitude of different devices.

The ongoing kafuffle about Google Books and whether or not it should be possible for one company to own the rights to publish so-called “orphaned books” (books for whom the rights holder cannot be contacted to secure permission to publish) is cast in a new light with the announcement that Google wants to move into the ebook business in a big way. Bizarrely, because Google has stated that it wants its service to be browser accessible, this plays to Microsoft’s ebook strategy.